Olympic Breakfast at Ponti’s (the larger, grander one in the Station with additional Food Hall). Talk of “theological space cadets”. These 9am egg and mushroom patrons! Business meetings over bad coffee and worse service. The concourse moves below, a shifting mirror. This futuristic throwback. London’s Double Vision.
In New York, In New York…
In New York you can find Wifi on every corner.
I try to reimagine the Station as landscape – a rolling grassland edged by cliffs. Rivulets, an ox-bow. This is liminal. Tenurial rights. Between the wall and the limit. Whatever you want me to be. A Street, a Borough, a Place, an Opening.
Log on at Fenchurch. No fen. No church.
A fissure where the City ends leads right down. We build up – impetuous, occupied, like parambulant texters on Brick Lane. Through a tangle of wires, Victorian piping, forgotten sewerage, every bit of owned earth; where the carriage lights shudder between stops.
Hoccleve walks, head down. Marlowe walks, from Norton Folgate, lost liberty. Sinclair walks, from Hackney, past the Round Church and pound shops. The 67 to Dalston is time travel. The Monster Book of Trucks, ONE POUND. 35 unsharpened pencils, ONE POUND. Bleech, unbranded, ONE POUND.
History is more than exposed brick or the looming, rusting arm of a rig crane suspended above a Shoreditch house party. An anonymous phone call at 2am. A moment held, coiled, held.
Tom Chivers 